moon traveller herald

i. Putzd about with books this year. A bio of Joe McCarthy. A thing about the Gospels by Gary Willis. John Wooden book on how to be a good basketball player. Mailer’s Fire on the Moon in honor of the Lunar Commemoration. One thing I actually finished was Team of Rivals. This Lincoln book didn’t quite hit the mark compared to some of my other history ‘books of the year’ - on Eisenhower , on McArthur , of Grant (is there an apparent thread here?) – but here goes on a book report.. Before Abraham Lincoln was an improbable president, he was an improbable presidential candidate. A bitterly poor youth – he worked every kind of job (land tiller, mule skinner, boat guy, and so on) as he sought to rise from the impoverished mire – was dramatically capped with two years in the 1840s as a Congressman where he unpopularly challenged the Mexican War. But then, quickly, it was back to Illinois for a very long stint as a circuit court rider lawyer. He benefited fortuitously from the locale of the 1...

Let's start the cavalcade of year in review...remember this piece about cityCityCITY? ...Last year saw release of the beat manuscript legend known as “And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks,” a book about Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer composed by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in their early writing days [circa 1945]. But that is not what I came here to talk about - Boston sports writer George Kimball does a real good job on the 'hippo' book in the Nov 8 [2008] issue of the Boston Phoenix in a piece entitled Back Beat ; I will take another tact. I am here to write about a short story by Kerouac called “cityCityCITY” . This is a Kerouac story stylistically unlike any of his others. In a beat buff blindfold test, I’d bet most people would guess that William Burroughs wrote it. Yes, stylistically it is closely related to the Missourian’s work... Read the rest of the story...